1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to phonetic variation model building apparatuses and methods, and in particular relates to phonetic recognition systems and methods using phonetic variation model building apparatuses and methods.
2. Description of the Related Art
For same languages, accents of different groups of speakers may differ due to regional or social status norms and practices. Moreover, language accents may be influenced by second language speakers. For example, a person whose first language is Hokkien (a Chinese dialect) may speak Mandarin Chinese (the official Chinese dialect) with the Hokkien accent, or a person whose first language is Mandarin Chinese may speak English with the Chinese accent. Relative to the standard languages (Chinese and English), these non-standardized accents (such as to speek Chinese with the Hokkien accent or to speek English with the Chinese accent) are called “phonetic variations”. For conventional phonetic recognition devices (or speech recognition system/software), non-standardized accents (non-standardized phonemes) usually result in a low recognition rates.
Accordingly, phonetic variation models, which account for some non-standardized phonemes, in phonetic recognition devices, have been developed. However, phonetic recognition devices having phonetic variation models are costly as much time and manual labor is required. Moreover, with about 7,000 languages in the world, potentially having corresponding influences therebetween, the amount of phonemes which may be identified for a single language is extremely large. Thus, conventionally, only a limited amount of non-standardized phonemes are identified in conventional phonetic variation models.
Therefore, a phonetic recognition system and method using a phonetic variation model building apparatus and method is desired, wherein an ideal amount of phonetic variation models may be achieved without individually identifying a large amount of non-standardized phonemes.